The next male in line of succession was Enrique and, as last resort, the eldest daughter, Berenguela, former queen of León. Blanca and Urraca were already married to kings. 30 chapter one hand over the regular government of the kingdom to count Álvaro Núñez de Lara, who would also be the caretaker and regent; but in all matters of greater importance, she would be the one who would have the last word. 34 One of Alvaro’s first initiatives was to manage to get Enrique I to declare war against the noblemen don Lope Díaz de Haro and don Rodrigo Díaz de los Cameros, representatives of the other great family/clan who, together with the Laras, shared political and economic control of Christian Spain.

The difficulty of unraveling this entangled tradition of historical chronicles has indeed been one of the reasons why this field has been neglected. On the other hand, from the historiographic perspective of today, it is difficult for us to understand the unitary concept of culture medieval people had, hence the effort of modern scholars to separate the field of history from that of fiction, poetry, mythology, etc. But when such fields prove inseparable, as is the case frequently in Alfonsine works, the genre that suffers most is history, which, as a result of our modern criteria and prejudices, must appear always as an objective and smooth narrative devoid of all the obstacles of subjectivity, expository commentary, rhetorical amplification, and, above all, mythology and legend.

The “alfonsine era” 9 a specific statement about this issue, but it is clear that that’s how he felt when, in praising Tiberius Caesar Augustus, he writes in Estoria de España: “And when some in the city would speak ill of him, or attributed bad news to him, or composed a satirical song about him or his family, he was not bothered nor did he misbehave against anyone; instead, he said that in a free city, there should be freedom of expression and of the will of men to say what they wanted” (I, p.